It is really tough to get tick­ets to the actual tour­na­ment unless you know some­body with an in or want to spend big bucks on scalped tick­ets. When Donna and I moved down here prac­tice rounds were sold on the day of in unlim­ited amounts. We are not golfers, but not going to Augusta National when you have a chance would be like liv­ing in Indi­anapo­lis and not attend the 500. We went for the first 3 years on Mon­day because it was always the least attended day. After the third year the crowds were get­ting so big that they decided to limit the prac­tice round tick­ets to a cer­tain num­ber (they’ve kept that a secret) by hav­ing a ticket lot­tery. For the next 3 years we got tick­ets, but for the last 7 we have been shut out. A lot of other locals that used to go reg­u­larly have also not got­ten tick­ets in a while. There is a lot of spec­u­la­tion that out-of-town appli­ca­tions get spe­cial treat­ment because that way more money is pumped into the local econ­omy. There have even urban leg­end type talk of peo­ple putting their out-of-town rel­a­tives addresses on the appli­ca­tions and they have got­ten selected for tickets.

The rea­son I’m rant­ing about this April event now, is that in today’s mail, I got my appli­ca­tion to get in the prac­tice round ticket lot­tery. I am seri­ously con­sid­er­ing putting my Mom’s Con­necti­cut address on there to test the the­ory. It is not that I’m really des­per­ate to get in and see the golfers or the course again, but I need a new hat. My hat from 7 years ago is get­ting dis­gust­ing look­ing. I’ve checked eBay and can’t find the right one — just the word Mas­ters in script with no flag or year.

Movie after­noon here at the Bog­a­r­dus Estate. Started off, by turn­ing off, Far From Heaven 30 min­utes into it. The movie cap­tured the feel of the Fifties too well, so much so that it seemed on the edge of par­ody to me. I can’t explain it more that I didn’t get inter­ested enough in the char­ac­ters enough to care about their drama.

The next movie didn’t even get into the DVD player, Don’t Look Now. I orig­i­nally rented after watch­ing Don­ald Suther­land talk about the movie on Inside The Actor’s Stu­dio. John Lip­ton effer­vesced over the film, plus they talked of rumors that the love scene between Don­ald and Julie Christie was not act­ing. But I for­got who was in the movie and when I read this blurb on the DVD sleeve, “John and Laura Bax­ter just lost their daugh­ter in a tragic drown­ing acci­dent. While liv­ing in Venice, an elderly psy­chic insists that she sees the spirit of the child. They’re unsure of whether to place their emo­tional well being in the hands of a stranger, but John begins to have psy­chic flashes of his own, see­ing the child walk the streets of Venice. Is he insane, or is there a deeper mean­ing to the sight­ings?”, I just put it back in the envelope.

I did watch 2 movies all the way through. I had rented The Truth About Char­lie and when I put it in the player it turns out I put it in upside down, as the movie on which it was based, Cha­rade, was on that side of the disc. So what the heck, let’s watch this one first and then we can com­pare the two. I think that it was very stu­pid to include this ver­sion on the flip side because by com­par­i­son the orig­i­nal is a bet­ter movie than the update. Mark Wal­berg is a stick. Cary Grant just being his usual Cary Grant self has more on screen charisma than Marky Mark will ever have. Of course it could have been very smart to put these movies back-to-back, as it did make me watch “The Truth About Char­lie” all the way through. I’m sorry I did, as the end­ing was mud­dled and seemed to have been made way dif­fer­ent on pur­pose to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the films.

Mov­ing all the blog­ger entries over here was real easy thanks to the folks who wrote MT. I’m now in the process of mov­ing The Miata Diaries over to MT as well. This one will be more time con­sum­ing, but just because I’m more anal reten­tive than most I guess. When import­ing to MT if you don’t have a title, like an indi­gent blog­ger, one will be appointed you (the first five words of the post or some­thing.) For the rant I had been giv­ing each post a title, but no so for the diaries. So instead of just let­ting it do the work I’m going back and writ­ing titles for all the posts, like 500 (I started on Jan­u­ary 1st, 2002)

It was fun pre­tend­ing to be a news­pa­per head­line edi­tor, then I started pick­ing out pos­si­ble dou­ble enten­dres for pos­si­ble high search engine hits then I got bored and cut and pasted ran­dom phrases from the text. I’m about a third of the way through and my resolve is fad­ing fast. I am going through and fix­ing some of the out­dated links. I’m going to try and fix the pop up win­dows for images too. I was using a java script thingie, but want to take advan­tage of the one built in to MT. Oh, well, it will keep me off the streets.…

…where nearly every sci-fi movie has gone before.

We watched Star Trek: Neme­sis this after­noon. I think this is sup­posed to be their (The Next Gen­er­a­tions) last movie together. After 4 of these I think they believe it is time to hang up the phasers and tri­corders. I sec­ond that emo­tion, its about time.

When watch­ing this movie I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen this all before. To go along with the bald face copy­ing of other movies: Data walk­ing Picard down the hall as a pris­oner — Star Wars. Ditto the jump­ing down a lit­tle chute to escape a laser battle.

We have also lapsed into the stan­dard movie cliches of good guys in white and bad guys in black, even down to drink­ing from white or black tea cups. The bad guys fire 6,000 laser blasts and only man­age to cre­ate sparks and charred walls, while the good guys fire 6 shots and kill 12 baddies.

Why is it that we can pick out 6 dis­tinct lit­tle pieces of an android from light-years away, but when sev­eral bad guys beam aboard our space­craft we have to grab some guns and search around cor­ri­dors for them?

I used to be a Trekkie back in the day. I watched the Orig­i­nal Series when they first came on and later lived on reruns. And enjoyed the movies (even the lame-o first one) until about the 6th one. I watched all the ST:TNG episodes and now have semi-enjoyed their movies. But please no more.

I guess I really am a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment. I ordered sev­eral stick­ers from the Cafe­Press store for this blog and some from the Miata Diaries store as well on the 14th of June. On the 17th their sta­tus was “In Pro­duc­tion.” One week later they were still In Pro­duc­tion, so I called their Cus­tomer Ser­vice num­ber. After a not too long of a wait the CSR told me that they were hav­ing a slight prob­lem with the sticker mate­r­ial not print­ing right so that everyone’s sticker orders were delayed. She informed me that my order was going out today.

The last time I called about a delayed “In Pro­duc­tion” order, I received my orig­i­nal order and then sev­eral days later I got a sec­ond shirt via UPS sec­ond day. They never charged for the 2nd shirt and I never said any­thing. Maybe I’ll get 2 orders of stick­ers. If I do I’ll report it here and I’ll give the dou­bles away.

It seems for some rea­son that my life has been some­how thrust into the same orbit as 9 year-old boys’ base­ball teams. Tonight’s enter­tain­ment involved a trip to Asheville (most of the whole 30 miles on the park­way) to see the Asheville Tourists play base­ball. No they are not 9 year-olds, but about 10 or 12 years older, the Tourists are the Sin­gle A farm club of the Col­orado Rockies.

In atten­dance for tonight’s game was the Bun­combe County 9 year-old All Star team hav­ing just won their regional tour­na­ment ear­lier in the day. Some­where around the 7th inning these guys got a lit­tle bored and decided to start the wave. They man­aged to get a good response from the first sec­tion (prob­a­bly because that’s where their par­ents were sit­ting) but each suc­ces­sive sec­tion saw fewer peo­ple par­tic­i­pant until the “wave” died a speedy dead. The drop off was almost expo­nen­tial, by 3 sec­tions away it was maybe 2 peo­ple join­ing in. They even tried split­ting up and get­ting a cou­ple kids to stand in front of a sec­tion as lead­ers. Much to my plea­sure that didn’t work either. Sorry boys, go back to play­ing the game.

Oh, yeah I got to drive to and from the sta­dium as long as I promised to go a rea­son­able rate of speed, deter­mined by the pas­sen­gers. Before we left the Inn’s lot I pulled out the Windex from the trunk of the Miata and gave the inside and out­side of the wind­shield a nice bath.